Mummy’s the word: Unwrapping the past with Fascinating Mummies

Our obsession with mummies, curses and what lies beneath those linen bandages is set to be explored in a new national exhibition, explains Alice Wyllie

Picture the scene. You’re at a Victorian dinner party when your host announces that there’s a surprise in store for you. Along with the rest of the guests you’re led to the parlour where a rather ghoulish sight awaits. An ancient Egyptian mummy lies prone in the middle of the room. This is a mummy unwrapping party and you’re here to defile the remains of some poor chap who’s lain intact for millennia. Your host has brought him back from the Grand Tour and thinks it would be a lark to give his guests a bit of a scare. After you’ve quite literally stripped away his dignity it’s off to the smoking room for brandies and cigars. As for the poor mummy, he’s bound for the bin.

Such parties were common in Victorian high society, and illustrate that our fascination with mummies is nothing new. Today an exhibition opens at the National Museum of Scotland – the first blockbuster show since its refurbishment – and it’s all about mummies.

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Fascinating Mummies will display treasures from the world-famous Egyptology collections of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. Such is our interest in mummies that the museum expects to attract at least 80,000 visitors to the exhibition over the next three months. The NMS is the only UK museum which will be showcasing the collection, and it will be complemented by mummies and artefacts from its own extensive archive.

Today I’m examining a mummy at the NMS archives in Edinburgh with four conservationists, and the attitude towards these remains couldn’t be more different to that of the Victorians. The mummy – a woman who has never been unwrapped – is referred to like a person rather than an object. When she’s not being worked on, her remains are respectfully hidden from view beneath a box.

Next to her, on another table, is a coffin belonging to a different mummy which is being prepared for the exhibition, the layers of shoddy restoration it has been subjected to over the past century being carefully removed. The researchers know the name of this mummy, Amenhotepiyin, son of Amunkhai and Bakri, and they use his name when discussing their work.

“This is the coffin of a human being,” says Ticca Ogilvie, the head of artefact conservation. “The ancient Egyptians were these amazing people who had this incredible civilisation and that sometimes stops people from viewing them as human, in a way. We respect them for their amazing civilisation but we don’t tend to show them that same respect as individuals. That’s one of the reasons that this mummy is covered right now; she was a person. Why should everyone get to gawp at her?”

Today mummies are shown courtesy which hasn’t been afforded to them for thousands of years – but our fascination with them runs as deep as ever. The west’s obsession with mummies dates back to the 1798 Battle of the Nile, between Nelson and Napoleon, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered, meaning that hieroglyphics could finally be deciphered. There was, of course, a second wave of “Egypt-o-mania” in 1922 when Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the intact tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen.

Famously, Carnarvon died after accidentally shaving an infected mosquito bite, fuelling rumours that there was a “curse of the mummy” on the tomb. It was this supposed curse which provided the inspiration for endless horror films and the depiction of mummies in popular culture as lurching, groaning ghouls, arms stretched out in front of them, bandages trailing.

Today, their appeal lives on, with the ancient Egyptian galleries at the NMS remaining among the most popular with visitors.

Dr Aidan Dodson is a senior research fellow in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology at Bristol University, where he teaches Egyptology, and is chair of trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society. He is advising the NMS on the Fascinating Mummies exhibition.

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He says: “People have this morbid fascination with the dead and mummies are probably the most in-your-face manifestation of the way that the dead can remain with us. Then there’s the very fact that you can even look at their faces and recognise them as human beings. It’s not just a pile of bones. The very well-preserved ones look as though they could simply open their eyes. I think that’s the spookiness about them, that they’re not quite so obviously, totally dead as a skeleton is.”

Has he ever felt a little spooked, working with mummies? “I must say that when I first got involved with them, if I was in a museum storage facility that was not particularly well-lit, and there’s this thing there that’s something clearly ‘other’, there is a sense that there’s something not quite right,” he says. “It’s not a proper long-dead pile of bones, nor is it a fresh body. It’s somebody who’s been around for a very long time, who has looked like that for a very long time.”

Interest in mummies has manifested itself in some rather odd ways in the last few centuries. In the 16th century a pigment was created called “mummy brown”. Popular with the pre-Raphaelites, it was made using the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies. It remained popular until the 19th century when it fell out of favour, and was produced until the 20th century, when the supply of mummies eventually ran out.

Indeed, mummies were often treated as commodities. Their wrappings were used to make paper and there are even apocryphal stories of them being used as fuel for Egyptian trains. They were also used for medicine, with superstitions stretching back to early medieval times dictating that they could be used to treat a number of diseases.

The practice is said to have originated during the Crusades, when Crusaders were intrigued to see bodies which had been dead for so long in such a well-preserved state. In the 16th century, French king Francis I took a dose of mummy powder every day while Charles II is said to have rubbed it on his skin, believing it would turn him into a pharaoh. Soon, mummies were being dug up to order to satisfy Europe’s demand for them.

The process of mummification developed over time. Only available to kings at first, as the years passed it was an option for more and more people, and the level of mummification was dependent on what the individual’s family could afford.

The embalmer would begin by removing all the internal organs, except the heart. The body would then be packed and covered with a salty drying agent before being left to dry out for around six weeks, leaving just hair, skin and bones.

Next, the body cavity was stuffed with sawdust, resin or linen, then the corpse was wrapped in layer upon layer of linen, with amulets concealed between the folds. Men, women and children were all mummified, and even animals got the bandage treatment; the Fascinating Mummies exhibition includes a mummified crocodile.

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“The ancient Egyptians developed the view that to survive in the next world the whole person had to be preserved,” says Dr Dodson. “The idea was that when you died you split into a number of different elements, most of which were spiritual but one of which was the body and their view was that they all interacted with each other to ensure the person had a proper afterlife. The body remained on earth as part of the conduit of offerings so that the person always had a foot on earth. But the point was also to ensure you were not forgotten.

This is a key feature of the exhibition, one of the taglines of which is: “to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again,” an ancient Egyptian inscription. As such, where possible, all the mummies in the exhibition are named, and details of their lives revealed to visitors.

“We know enough about their beliefs at the time to know that they probably would have appreciated the attention we are giving them,” says Dr Dodson. “They may not be in the quiet of the tomb any more but the very fact that people around them are speaking their names at every moment, well, I suspect that if you were able to ask them whether they would rather be forgotten in a tomb in the desert or actually have people talking about them, that probably, spiritually, the latter would be seen as doing them a world of good.”

The curators of the exhibition, however, don’t want to turn the mummies into a sideshow, and as such have taken steps to recreate the mood of a tomb – using low lighting, for example – to ensure that there is an atmosphere of respect.

Visitors will also be able to find out more about the individuals in the exhibition through CT scans and scientific analysis, which reveal details about life in ancient Egypt, including information on diet and illnesses. The scans also reveal hidden treasures beneath the linen wrappings including amulets and scrolls.

Other exhibits include bread, which was often buried in a tomb with a mummy, and a wooden tag – the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a mortuary toe tag – which was once attached to a princess.

The attitude towards the exhibits in Fascinating Mummies is certainly a far cry from the approach that has been taken for centuries. They are not pigment, medicine or fuel, but the remains of individuals who once walked the earth, just like us. They will be brought back to life not by some ghoulish curse, but by the visitors to the exhibition who will “speak their names and make them live again”.

• Fascinating Mummies opens at the National Museum of Scotland runs until 27 May. Members free, adults £9, concessions £7.50, child 5-15 years £6, 0-4 years free, family (two adults and two children) £26.

Tel: 0300 123 6789 or visit www.nms.ac.uk for details.